This bizarre, controlling attitude to stationery drives me nuts. The kids turn up to secondary school in year seven too afraid to turn the page without my permission and keep sticking their hand in the air to ask if they're allowed to write with x-coloured pen. They look at me with wide eyes when I tell them that they should make their own choices about stationery and use their initiative about turning the page.

we had this with DS a couple of years ago. He was meant to have blue but had black. We were only told they needed handwriting pens, and he was made to borrow someone else's. I wrote her a letter asking what difference it made and why should someone else have to provide a pen just to suit them when he had perfectly good black pens (they mark in red so that's not the issue). She did reply but still didn't answer the question about what difference it made.

Same as the other week DS was making cupcakes at school. We realised the night before it said muffin cases but we only had the smaller cupcake ones. We sent him with proportionally less ingredients slight oversight on the marg too so he could make 12 small cakes. They said he had to use muffin cases and he borrowed some off someone else and made 12 small cakes in giant muffin cases . Were delicious though

DD1 had a new teacher in Y5 who insisted (on pain of detentions) that all work was done in black ink. The school office sold only blue ink pens. He wouldn't listen to reason, so I set the dragon school secretary on him.

My impression is (and correct me if I'm wrong but I have worked with several teachers who have worked in Scotland and England) that we are generally trusted to be professional and capable of doing our job up here in Scotland.So we don't tend to be micro-managed at such a ridiculous level. Head teachers checking exercise books for pen colour!?

Most teachers up here would be outraged if a Head or SMT member swooped in to "check up".

I thank fuck, pretty much every day at the moment, that I didn't go into teaching as I had planned to. I'd have killed someone by now and it would not have been one of the kids. FFS it's all so bloody ridiculous!

At my previous school the head tried to dictate that we should stop marking in red pen before he thought it might affect student's self esteem! Apparently we should use a more "inspirational" pink or green instead.

I think this thread has done a lot for the customer to understand how truly insane and limiting this one small aspect of classroom practice can be.Now, multiply this by a thousand and fifteen, and you have our day.